Her Master's Servant (Lord and Master Book 2) (3 page)

‘I disagree, Luna,’ he said quietly. ‘There’s something else I want to show you.’

Luna returned to her hotel two hours later having given Rafe Davies her verbal consent to use her father’s song. Rather than go straight to her room, which suddenly seemed less like a refuge and more like a prison, she opted to go to the hotel’s deserted restaurant, sitting at a table next to the window and ordering a cup of tea.

Looking back on her conversation with Davies, she wondered if he knew about her father’s suicide. Lukas Gregory’s death in the train station at Newbury thirteen years earlier had been reported as an accident, but there was something about Davies’ expression when he’d talked about the ‘double edged sword’ of public attention. Luvvie or not, Luna felt that his intentions in meeting with her were honourable. She liked Rafe Davies, and she shared his hope that this advertisement might lead to a public re-examination of her father’s work.

Luna sipped her tea as she watched a steady stream of pedestrians – some tourists, some office workers on their way to lunch – walk past her window. Life went on.

She had taken great care during her adult life to isolate the period after her parents’ deaths, placing the emotions she couldn’t deal with into drawers in an imaginary apothecary chest. And perhaps the only advantage of becoming an orphan at the age of twelve was that every other bad thing paled in comparison. Losing Stefan had been the first time in a decade that she’d allowed herself to feel genuine heartbreak – but it didn’t compare to the loss of her parents.

Stefan was still alive, after all. He was alive, and would eventually go on to live a full and happy life, Luna was sure of that. She just wouldn’t be a part of it. She practised putting the lump of pain this thought provoked into a drawer in her apothecary chest. But it wouldn’t fit, not yet.

Luna finished her tea. Then pulled out her mobile and phoned Sören Lundgren to accept his offer of employment.

Standing on top of the hill overlooking the ocean, Luna looked over to see the ewe she’d just rescued grazing happily on the adjacent patch of grass, its recent misadventures completely forgotten.

It had been two months since she had taken the overnight ferry from Aberdeen to Lerwick, a stormy February night she’d spent reeling between the deck of the ferry and the loo, heaving her guts out. The sea grew calmer as they approached Shetland’s main port and capital city, and Luna’s overwhelming first impression as they pulled into the harbour was of greyness. Grey fog, grey granite buildings, grey scales on the cod being unloaded from a nearby trawler…

She had learned, in the time she had been there, that the true colour of Shetland was green. A thousand different shades of green. And black, for her. Sören required a thousand black Shetland sheep to produce enough wool to launch a limited edition, bespoke range of all-natural outerwear.

Unfortunately, Malcolm Couper’s flock of black sheep was comparatively small, numbering around a hundred. And he was the only farmer on the ‘Mainland’ (Shetland being an archipelago of hundreds of islands, only sixteen of which were inhabited) who specialised in black sheep. Shetland sheep came in every colour from white to grey to brown, to various mixtures of them all. Because breeding exclusively black sheep required effort, and because black wool was less versatile than white, being impossible to dye, farmers were reluctant to breed them.

‘They see black sheep as a nuisance, or worse, bad luck,’ Malcolm explained during the tour of the area he gave her that very first day, his cherubic face creasing into a smile. ‘You’ve heard the term “black sheep of the family”? Well, it started in Scotland. Some folks up here still think that even one black sheep brings bad luck to the entire flock.’

Never mind that what Sören and Malcolm were proposing – a cooperative of sorts that would represent the farmers’ interests in selling both their wool and the meat from their lambs – represented a massive opportunity for these farmers, many of whom barely eked an existence working land owned by someone else. Never mind that it might result in the creation of a new industry, and jobs, on an island where fishing and tourism were currently about the only game in town.

They were mistrustful, these Shetlander farmers, of outsiders in general and folks who told them how to do their job in particular.

From her vantage point atop the cliff side, Luna could see heavy clouds rolling in from the west, across the Atlantic. With a little sigh, she pulled on her helmet and mounted her bike. The ewe had presented her with an opportunity, one she needed to act on.

Rules for living in Shetland

Rule 1 – Say yes to every offer unless there’s a really good reason for saying no.*

Five minutes later Luna pulled into a farmyard a few miles inland from the coast. With its whitewashed, two-storey stone farmhouse and adjacent corrugated iron barn surrounded by a variety of tractors in various states of repair, the Ollason property was a working farm. In the paddock adjacent to the barn were around thirty black and white Shetland cattle, and as Luna pulled to a halt outside the barn, several chickens ran squawking in front of her.

She jumped off her bike and removed her helmet just as Chris Ollason emerged from the barn. A thin, wiry man in his mid-forties, Chris reminded Luna of his livestock. Like them, his physique seemed to be perfectly adapted to the harsh environment of the island. All that was visible for miles around his farm was heather and peat bogs, punctuated by the occasional stretch of scruffy, blue-green grass. There were no trees, the poor soil and near constant wind on the Shetlands making them unviable.

Dressed in a well-worn blue boiler suit, he was wiping his greasy hands on a cloth and raising a hand to Luna when his wife Ruth stepped out of the house, drying her hands on a dishcloth herself. Luna made a point of greeting Ruth first, virtually turning her back on Chris.

‘I’ve just been down that track you told me about,’ Luna said, smiling at her.

‘The one down to the cliffs?’ Ruth asked, gesturing toward the sea in the distance.

Luna nodded. ‘You were right. That has to be in my top five coastal views ever.’

Ruth’s lips curved, her black eyes shining and dimples forming in her cheeks. ‘Well, we like it, don’t we, Chris.’

‘You manage to get that all the way down there?’ Chris asked, nodding toward her bike. Or, actually, what he really said came out more like, ‘Du menege to get dat all da wee down dere?’ It had taken Luna a while to train her ear to his local accent. Ruth, who hailed originally from near Edinburgh, was much easier to understand, with her genteel Midlothian accent.

Luna patted the saddle of the bike affectionately. ‘Oh, aye,’ she said, smiling at the bit of colloquial Scottish that had crept into her own vocabulary. Then, remembering the purpose of her visit, she said, ‘I found one of your sheep stuck in a fence up there. I got her out, no probs, and I tried to fettle the fence, but one of the posts has come out.’

‘Right, I’ll nep n tek a look at it later,’ Chris nodded, casting a final envious glance at the bike. Chris was an ex-biker himself who had only given up at Ruth’s insistence. He headed back into the barn.

‘You want to come in for a brew?’ Ruth asked. ‘I’ve just made some scones.’

Luna made a show of demurring, but her answer was never really in doubt.

‘Well, if you’re sure you don’t mind…’

To which Ruth just laughed and said, ‘Come on, you,’ and headed back into the kitchen, Luna following in her wake.

* When the offer involves food, the answer is always yes.

‘Home’ for the past two months had been Malcolm Couper’s small croft ten miles outside of Lerwick. Not quite as bleakly evocative as the Ollason farm, nor nearly as large at only twenty acres, the croft had been unoccupied for almost a decade before Malcolm moved in with his new wife three years ago, full of plans. He’d set about converting the dilapidated stone cottage with its ‘fael’, or turf roof, into holiday accommodation, built a kit home for himself, his Norwegian wife Liv and their little boy George, and most ambitious of all, started breeding his herd of black Shetland sheep, some of whom were grazing near the entrance to the croft as Luna pulled up the dirt track.

Malcolm’s two border collies, Castor and Pollux, stood together next to the farm gate, barking furiously at her approach, stopping only when Luna removed her helmet. Then the two brothers moved as one toward her, begging to be petted.

Entering the stone cottage through a doorway so low she had to duck her head, Luna quickly removed her biking jacket in the small front hallway, hanging it on a wooden peg behind the door, and removed her boots. She pushed open the oak tongue and groove door to the front room to find a tall, angular woman with short, strawberry-blonde hair sitting on the settee, working on her laptop – Dagmar Sandhorst, Sören’s lead buyer and Luna’s boss.

Luna thought Dagmar looked pleased to see her, but it was difficult to tell, given that her boss’s default expression was diffident bordering on gloomy.

Nodding to her, Luna said, ‘
Hallå i stugan.
’

‘
Hej
, Luna,’ Dagmar said. ‘
Hur är det?
’

Luna briefly gave a thumbs up, then added, ‘I’ll just go change and we’ll be off, yes?’

‘Okay,’ Dagmar replied. Somewhat dubiously, Luna thought. Dagmar was not yet convinced of the value of their Tuesday night outings.

She quickly bounded up the tiny, creaking stairs to the master bedroom. On Luna’s arrival two months ago, Dagmar, who only spent three days per week in Shetland, had graciously offered to move into the smaller twin bedroom on the ground floor. Not that Luna’s room was large – none of the rooms in the cottage could honestly be described as ‘roomy’ – but with its antique rosewood bed with a cast iron bath at its foot, and two skylights in the sloping ceiling, the loft was the brightest room in the house. And if you stood in the well of one of the skylights, it commanded a lovely view of nearby Lerwick, particularly at night.

Luna peeled off her Gore-Tex trousers and pulled on some jeans, then donned a t-shirt, followed by a long-sleeved shirt. She paused to consider which of her five Shetland wool sweaters she should wear that evening – the white, the dark grey, the light grey, the several shades of grey, or the black. The black, she decided, pulling it over her head.

She briefly studied her face in the mirror over the ancient porcelain sink in the corner of the loft. The woman in the reflection looked almost preternaturally pale, with blue eyes so milky they were practically opaque, and a pallid, heart-shaped face framed by long, dark brown hair. And sad, Luna realised. She looked sad.

Swiftly turning away from her reflection, she walked out of the bedroom and ran down the stairs, meeting Dagmar in the front hall. She thought she saw the ghost of a smile on Dagmar’s lips at the sight of her black sweater, but again it was hard to tell; it could just as easily have been a grimace.

The two women exited the cottage and made their way to the bungalow. When Luna had first arrived at the croft, she wondered why Malcolm hadn’t kept the quainter stone cottage for himself, but in the intervening weeks, shivering in her bed as the wind whistled across the loft, she began to understand. The cottage was fine for occasional visitors, birdwatchers and the like, who mostly came during the summer. In the winter months, however, the place was deadly cold.

Malcolm and Liv’s brand new ‘passivhaus’, by contrast, had solar panels and a ground source heat pump. Their open-plan kitchen practically oozed cosiness as Luna and Dagmar entered to find Liv sitting at the table coaxing George to eat his dinner, while Malcolm washed dishes in the sink.

Malcolm and Liv were a bit of a mystery to Luna. At age fifty-three, Malcolm was twenty years his wife’s senior, and temperament-wise, they couldn’t have been more different, Malcolm being an innovator and risk-taker, while Liv was fundamentally risk averse. Likewise, whereas Malcolm had been quick to welcome Luna, Liv had taken much longer to warm up.

‘Lulu!’ George shouted from his high chair, spattering what appeared to be pureed carrots on his mother in the process.

‘Hey, Georgie.’ Luna smiled at the toddler, whose plump, happy face was the spit of his father’s. Liv, meanwhile, took advantage of his momentarily open mouth to shovel in a spoonful of peas, before standing and adjusting her handmade wool smock.

‘Okay, Malkie,’ Liv began, ‘George needs to eat four more bites of his dinner, then he can watch CBeebies for a half hour. Then it’s story time and bath.’

‘Right, Liv, you get off,’ Malcolm replied. ‘George and I will be fine.’ But instead of following her husband’s advice, Liv began fluttering around George, who soon realised his mummy was going somewhere without him and began to cry. Dagmar looked at Luna impassively and cocked her head toward the door, indicating that she’d go wait in the car.

Rules for living in Shetland

Rule 3: Fake it till you make it.

It had been Luna’s idea to join the knitting club that met weekly at various houses in and around Lerwick. This despite the fact that she could not knit.

‘It’s a way of ingratiating ourselves in the community,’ she’d explained to Dagmar, and when her boss frowned her incomprehension she simplified, ‘A way of making friends.’

This week’s session was taking place at the home of Judith Andersen; at eighty-nine Lerwick’s oldest and most accomplished knitter. Not that any of the other twelve or so women in the club was a slouch, Luna reflected, looking around Judith’s small front room and adjacent dining room, currently pulsating to the sound of clicking needles. Dagmar herself was an excellent knitter – she’d made the black cable jumper Luna was wearing tonight – as was Ruth, from whose craft stall Luna had purchased her first, dark grey Shetland wool sweater on her third day on the island.

Luna, meanwhile, was sitting with Ruth’s nine-year-old daughter Maisie at a hastily installed card table next to the kitchen, laboriously working on a scarf, the simplest, most basic item of clothing she could make. And even that looked messy and uneven compared to Maisie’s sterling work; Luna hadn’t ‘learnt the trick of getting the tension right’, according to Judith.

But never mind. The knitting was secondary to Luna’s purpose anyway. With a show of sighing, she stood and walked over to Ruth where she sat with a trio of knitters on the settee.

‘What have I done wrong here?’ she asked, kneeling next to her. Ruth took her scarf and examined it, tsking under her breath.

‘We’re going to have to pull this entire row out to fix it,’ she said, starting to unravel Luna’s hard work of the past ten minutes. The women next to Ruth began to laugh and Luna cast them a guilty, slightly clueless look – a look that was not entirely her own.

Quite early on during her time on Shetland, Luna had realised that she would need help to accomplish what needed accomplishing here. No matter what Sören thought, at the end of the day she was just a PA. So when on her second day Malcolm had presented her with the bombsite that was his office, she’d been in her element, setting to on the stacks of paper, creating order out of chaos.

But the act of charming the locals, making friends with farmers, trying to win them over to her cause? That was another matter entirely. It required skills that Luna knew she lacked. So she had taken to pretending to be other people from time to time, as the occasion demanded.

For situations like this, where guileless sweetness was needed, she pretended to be Jem, the sweetest, most guileless person she knew. And when she was talking to builders at the site of the new wool processing building, or representatives from the local board of commerce, she pretended to be Nancy, her silver-tongued, hard-negotiating friend.

And then there was Stefan. She found that despite her best efforts, he would not stay in the drawer of her imaginary apothecary chest where she kept trying to put him. Some days he seemed to be with her constantly, a shadow standing just behind her shoulder, watching her. She remembered going to visit an old farmer named Petersen during her second week here, who practically chased her off his land.